6 Simple Ways to Boost Employee Engagement with an Employee Hub on Microsoft Office 365

The importance of employee engagement can’t be overstated. Employee engagement strategies can reduce staff turnover, improve productivity, and make more profits. Engaged employees are happier, involved and more productive.

This is common knowledge, yet employees continue to be engaged with simple, time-consuming tasks everyday – searching for documents, accessing information, completing HR forms, executing manual processes, and finding help – just to name a few. They lack an easy-to-use Employee Intranet Hub that provides the tools they need in one place which makes their work life simpler, more productive, and more engaged.

Here are 6 simple intranet engagement ideas for an Employee Hub on Office 365 (now renamed Microsoft 365):

1. Keep It Simple

Every digital workplace solution, whether it is out-of-the-box SharePoint/Microsoft Office 365 or a turnkey solution on these platforms, has customizable features. And the beauty of these solutions is that they can be tweaked and configured in many different ways for engaging employees. This however can be an advantage or a disadvantage. Sometimes organizations go too far with the customizations making the solution complicated and difficult to navigate, defeating the very purpose for which it was built.

An employee hub that is simple in its design, easy to get around, and which offers basic features can go a long way in boosting employee engagement than one which is packed with advanced capabilities, tools and complex navigation.

Complexity can certainly have its time and place, but it is usually most effective to keep things as simple as possible.

2. Keep It Interesting

An Employee Hub can only be as interesting as its content. Of course your staff will be accessing it for information, documents, collaboration, etc., but wouldn’t it be great if they can come to it for a little stress-relief and humor too?

For designing an engaging intranet, instead of just having company news or industry related articles on your intranet, spice it up with polls, surveys, jokes and funny videos that your staff can participate and comment on. Another way to make it appealing is to put content creation in the hands of your staff. This ensures you have fresh, vibrant content that is regularly updated.

Make sure your solution is equipped with easy publishing features, and recruit individuals who have the talent for writing engaging materials, which can get a conversation/discussion started or can facilitate a flow of ideas.

3. Provide Self-Help Tools

Self-help tools are those that help employees undertake tasks without depending on the others, such as your HR and IT, which goes a long way in reducing the burden and dependence on these resources.

For example you can:

• digitize and automate common forms used for requesting time off, purchase approvals, provide expense reimbursements using Office 365 employee expense reimbursement tool, etc.
• provide employees a central location where they can find updated policies & procedures
• Provide onboarding help for new employees
• give access to FAQs, knowledge base, and development training videos
• allow employees to submit IT service tickets and requests

It is obvious how these tools can free up HR and IT resources who can dedicate their time to more important activities.

4. Automate Workflows

Automating workflows helps employees save time from doing time sucking, mundane, manual tasks. Many organizations still employ manual methods of data entry, like entering travel expense information from approved paper forms into a spreadsheet so that reports can be run. This is time consuming and error prone.

Instead, when forms are automated, they collect validated information which is automatically stored in a database from which all kinds of reports can be run. Also, multi-stage workflows, like inventory updates, formula reviews for a manufacturing company, or general approvals from your manager or HR can be automated. You can also automate and bring in workflows from different systems, such as ERPs, CRMs, Sales and Finance, and so on.

5. Offer Collaboration Tools

People work differently now compared to how they worked 20, 30, 40 years ago. The new generation workers believe in open work spaces and collective efforts rather than sitting in closed cubicles and minding their own work, and an Employee Hub must offer the tools to emulate the same culture.

An Employee Hub must offer tools for collaborative work, like team sites for within team and cross-team execution, and document libraries for co-authoring and updating content. It must also provide useful and more efficient ways of communicating between people and teams. For example, integrating project discussions with Yammer on Microsoft Office 365, or providing voice and video conferencing capabilities for online meetings.

People have the need to constantly keep in touch or to be updated of changes immediately and with an Employee Intranet Hub on Microsoft Office 365 you can satisfy this need through chat and instant messaging tools and integrations with email applications to notify staff of changes to documents or news that they are following.

6. Enable Mobility

It is common knowledge that work is not accomplished only at the work place anymore. As more and more people work remotely, while traveling, from home, etc. information continues to be increasingly necessary to access on mobile devices. Users need anytime, any device access which makes mobility a key feature for your Employee hub. Mobility also helps to brings remote teams together and gets everybody on the same page, while also employing enterprise grade security.

If you are an organization that would like to increase employee engagement and retention with an Employee hub on Microsoft Office 365, please contact us at bizinfo@bizportals.com. We can help you evaluate your needs and provide you with a solution that fits you.